Word: lint
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...wives while stationed in France; 1963-74, moving, moving, moving, mother of four children, trying to paint and cook and sew and clean house until one day, as she was working in oils, the buzzer went off on the dryer and a light bulb went on in her head. Lint...
...There were so many clothes, so much washing interrupting my painting," she recalls. "I was just trying to turn a detriment to my advantage." A little glue, a little canvas, a little lint -- in time she began to regard it as "so painterly." Still, there was the artist's dilemma: "What did I want it to say for me? I was looking for strong social commentary. I didn't want it to be a decorative thing. And then, of course! It could speak for what it was. The work became much more three dimensional...
...about nostalgia, Barron says, for lint is nostalgic. It is about the fragility of life, and disintegration and death. And yet on the surface it has "the soft look of impressionism." One imagines a sort of shaggy Monet's Flower Garden, done in dust balls...
...year after she turned from oils to lint, Barron was divorced and, she says, happily so. The last stop in the peripatetic life of a military wife was Long Beach, and there she settled in a stucco house with a cedar-shake roof, palms and jacarandas along the street, rosebushes and jasmines running along the fence. From this base she would attain a master's in fine arts, a job teaching at nearby Brooks College and a world of lint. Friends, neighbors, students began to save...
Something broody crept into her work. From flowers, fashioned from lint and showcased in acrylic boxes, came scenes. An intimate birthday party, with a chocolate cake, flowers and candles on the table, two figures seated across from each other, and the artist's comment: "All the romantic items -- the roses and things -- sometimes obscure the other person. There is tension between the people. But it's a birthday! You still observe it. But the food might taste like lint...